Officials Comb Texas for Shuttle Debris

PAULINE ARRILLAGA

Published 7:00 pm, Sunday, February 2, 2003

AP National Writer

Authorities returned to the rain-dampened forests of East Texas on Monday in search of remnants of the space shuttle Columbia and remains of its astronauts, as divers headed to the depths of a huge reservoir where part of the shuttle may have splashed down.

Hundreds of investigators with expertise in airline accidents, engineering and forensics converged on a vast stretch of Texas and Louisiana to join in the painstaking search.

Overwhelmed local authorities scrambled to locate and guard pieces of debris, as NASA established command posts in Lufkin and at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana to oversee recovery and examination of the wreckage.

The area where wreckage was being found expanded westward Monday and another collection center was established at Naval Air Station Joint Reserve Base in Fort Worth, said Michael Kostelnik, NASA deputy associate administrator. The base is the former Carswell Air Force Base.

"It turns out that the debris field is quite large and still really being determined," Kostelnik said. "Today we find there is more things further west than we anticipated."

About 300 people from 30 agencies _ including the FBI, Federal Emergency Management Agency, National Transportation Safety Board and the Texas Department of Public Safety _ were being assigned to collect thousands of pieces as small as pebbles and as big as pickup trucks.

"Most of the things are not very large, from the size of a trash can lid to something much smaller, about half the size of a baseball bat," Nesbitt said in a telephone interview from the base.

Pieces of debris were being collected in a large hangar at the base. Engineers from shuttle contractor United Space Alliance will sort through the material in search of clues to what caused Columbia to break apart over Texas on Saturday morning just minutes before its scheduled landing in Florida.

Their goal is to reconstruct what is left of Columbia and establish a sequence of how each part peeled off during its high-speed re-entry into the atmosphere.

The salvage operation covers an area that stretches across the rolling hills of East Texas to a suburb of New Orleans, where authorities found what could be insulation from Columbia. Louisiana state police said they had taken custody of at least 20 possible shuttle pieces in 10 parishes as of Monday morning.

On the border of the two states, 14 divers from the Texas Department of Public Safety recovery team prepared Monday to search the Toledo Bend Reservoir for shuttle wreckage.

Fishermen said they saw a car-size chunk splash into the water Saturday.

The divers would wear helmets equipped with cameras, said dive team commander Lynn Dixon.

"We're not anticipating any visibility. The camera sees more than divers will see," Dixon said. Divers would have to rely on sense of touch to get around.

The heart of the search operation is East Texas, a region of thick forests of pines and oaks, expansive farmland and cow pastures. It holds four national forests, covering almost 700,000 acres, and two reservoirs _ including Toledo Bend _ that together span about 300,000 acres. The thick woods also are home to wild hogs and bobcats.

While the region is a magnet for hunters, boaters and anglers, its terrain makes the job facing Columbia recovery teams more difficult.

"This is forest _ dense forest," said James Kroll, director of the Emergency Geospatial Mapping Center at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches. "There is no way to describe how many pieces there are and how spread over the landscape they are.

"Ten years from now, folks are going to be walking around the woods and finding stuff."

In Nacogdoches County alone, authorities have logged more than 1,200 confirmed debris sites. State troopers and local authorities didn't have enough personnel to protect every piece, but they manned 130 spots to guard debris against scavengers.

They said NASA had provided a list of priorities: anything that could contain data or resembles computer circuitry, or potentially radioactive materials.

In San Augustine, just east of Nacogdoches, Larry Epps placed a 55-gallon barrel to protect a piece of metal that landed in his hay meadow, a hollow gray object that resembles a tire.

"If it hit me, my wife would have been a widow," he said. He later found what appears to be a circuit board about 100 yards away from his front yard and a half dozen 2-by-2-inch metal pieces in his meadow.

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There have been grim discoveries _ human remains, including a leg, torso, thigh bone and skull. NASA confirmed the remains of some of the seven Columbia astronauts had been recovered.